Snoop Dogg: real star power compromised by cringe-worthy sales tactics
Hip hop is celebrating its 50th birthday this year, and Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr, better known as Snoop Dogg, has been around for a good third of that fruitful lifespan. He first emerged as a guest on Dr Dre’s debut solo record, Deep Cover, in 1992. That track, with its craftily undulating bassline and taut piano stabs, enjoyed an outing at the O2 on Tuesday night, as did the full wealth of the gracefully lanky California rapper’s envious – and enormous: he has put out 19 solo albums and graced countless collaborative efforts over his career – back catalogue.
Such is the chameleonic nature of his fame, it’s easy to forget what Snoop, now 51, is really known for. He makes headlines with pretty much whatever he does, whether that be a reggae reinvention as Snoop Lion, or a gospel album (2018’s Bible Of Love), or the cookery show, Potluck Party Challenge, that he hosts with Martha Stewart. He pops up in movies and TV shows, and has more recently been inescapable providing the extremely catchy soundtrack to Just Eat’s TV adverts. He’s happy to play up to his self-made caricature of the weed-obsessed elder statesman of pimping and performing, to the point that his threadbare stage set features little more than a couple of picnic benches, a DJ riser, and four standalone poles that are set upon at intervals by gymnastic, lingerie-clad dancers.
However, for the best part of 60 minutes at the O2, all of this ultimately shrunk to insignificance whenever Snoop strode out alone. His delivery remained beat-perfect, and his presence magnetic, while tracks such as Gin & Juice and Doggystyle dripped with swagger, and Drop It Like It’s Hot might just be one of the most inventive songs of the last two decades.
One downside to such an ensemble musical career (most of Snoop’s biggest hits are collaborations with other artists) is that it makes for a live show of incomplete fragments. For the most part, this didn’t make much difference on Tuesday night, with the crowd more than willing to fill in for Justin Timberlake on Signs or for Pharrell Williams on Beautiful – though truncating the huge likes of Still D.R.E. and California Love risked repeat anticlimaxes.
Snoop clearly has an acute sense of humour and doesn’t mind being corny, leaning into his rap uncle status; but as with some of his more incongruous career choices, this can sometimes become a distraction. The only permanent front-of-stage presence besides Snoop on Tuesday was someone prancing about while dressed up as one of the hyped-up Bored Ape NFT digital pictures reportedly “owned” by the rapper. This, along with the incessant big-screen interval advertisements for “the first ever evolving tour collectible” as something that people might want to part with their cash (or crypto) for, was uncomfortably close to embarrassing.
The sympathetic view is that such intrusions merely emphasise just how compelling and charismatic a character Snoop himself is: the show’s most engaging moments were also its most stripped-back, just him and his gilded microphone on stage, curling multiple flows across his verses and crip stepping like a man 30 years his junior. Just leave the dumb cartoons to the kids though, eh?
Touring England and Ireland until March 28; ticketmaster.co.uk
